How can having an illness be seen under the category of pro’s and con’s???
your missing the point its what you get from the illness good or bad …
I know what you mean dynamite. Having something that is so terrible can bring out the best in people and also give you opportunities that you may never have had before or even thought of. I for one am enjoying wholeheartedly being off work. I do things I never had the chance to do before, meet people, read more etc etc. I am thinking about a career change also. Now, you might say, well you could have taken time off before and changed your career if you had wanted to enough and yes, i could if I really thought about it, but it has taken this massive crisis to push me into living my life to the full. That is what define as a pro - not the illness, the surgery, the radiotherapy although none of those have been anywhere near as bad as imagined.
Women who have’nt had breast cancer don’t know what they’re missing eh?
hey i can be even more flip than u babycham… but u can do it for us this time… i don’t mean that nastily at all - would any of us rather have a diagnosis of motor neurones? I doubt it. Equally many men/women have no understanding of the gift they have in not being ‘classed as ill’. Understandably they just get on with life and don’t understand.
I don’t have mets - i may do in the future. maybe my attitude will change if i do.
I am not saying there are plusses to having cancer just that i don’t see it as a negative experience because learning is a positive.
So… I just happen to have cancer - it happened to be my breast and I’ve done the mastectomy and am doing the chemo and will do the rads and then another 5 years of hormone treatment… same as loads of people who have breast cancer. I’d rather be me than my dad who was older, a creaking gate on gut things and by the time they diagnosed his colon cancer, there was not much chance at all. He died a very tired old man - but with huge dignity. I have more chance of living than my dad and I would rather enjoy what I do than think that I have been cheated - when I do not know that I have been - tongue in cheek and thinking about another thread … i could be knocked over by a bus tomorrow.
Breast cancer ruined your life? I am very sorry if that has how it hit you but i do believe we can go out and make new ones. My life has be turned upside down a few times and i know it isn’t easy but oh dear… i think all i am trying to say is
there is more to life than us having cancer.
babycham - u may feel quite cross about how i feel but hey… different peopel different views.
simple…
People with a good prognosis may find a couple of pros, but there is a lot of people with
a bad prognosis here, including myself, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing nice about living
with that.
This thread has made me quite cross actually.
Julie
I am sorry that you have a bad prognosis, Julie, but I don’t think you mean that we should all feel as you do?
I can’t presume to know how you feel. i have no doubt this comment will make you crosser but none of us have the right to say we should all be happy or all be sad. I think on this thread people have just said how they feel, not saying how others should be.
Rjenr2
I did’nt say breast cancer had ruined my life.
You’re confusing me with someone else.
Only something happening to one of my children could do that.
Actually I had a pretty good prognosis and I thought cancer was totally crap, now I have secondaries and I still think its terrible but probably worse, so I cant see any pros or cons in the fact that I have this crap to deal with and then I will ultimately die from it and my family will be left to soldier on without me…
So I am not sure I would say breast cancer has ruined my life because I am more than cancer, but there is nothing I repeat nothing good about this experience.
Cathy
babycham
no sorry - i was referring to something above… and didn’t attribute…
know what u mean re kids. mine are 19 and 21 but i still think of them as kids i need to look after
jen
Jen.
Are we still friends then? 
To reduce the experience of having cancer to a checklist of ‘pros and cons’ as though we were talking about the advantages and disadvantages of a wet holiday owes a lot to the contemporary fashion for turning breast cancer into some kind of must have designer disease. I can see the screaming headlines: ‘Have breast cancer and become a better person’; Transform your life with breast cancer; ‘You too can enjoy breast cancer’.
What other serious disease do we talk of with such nonsense.? Show me the forums where people discuss the ‘pros and cons’ of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, chronic heart disease or MS.
Thank goodness cancer is no longer spoken of in hushed secretive tones, but are we doing any better by celebrating cancer’s life enhancing potential?
For some of us cancer is less of a wake up call than a good night finale. I think most people who have cancer, whatever stage, whatever prognosis, try best they can to live as well as they can for as long as they can, but that living for many people is accompanied by deep and real physical and emotional agony. Some people who have posted on this thread are very ill indeed, others of us, less ill right now, know nonetheless that the lives we once dreamed of will not be. Young women are dying before their adult lives have hardly begun, older women like myself won’t get the retirement we looked forward to, countless young children will lose their mothers, young women who longed for children are infertile. In this context I feel very angry at this talk of the ‘pros’ of cancer.
Jane
Like I said before, it depends on the prognosis. Its easier perhaps with those who know cancer has touched their lives but not destroyed it or going to end it, to feel that there is something positive come from out of this. I can also see clearly that people with other diseases could also find a pro - eg my mother had a heart attack. She changed her lifestyle right around and slimmed down, stopped drinking, took up exercise. She claimed that having a heart attack saved her life. I guess there are numerous people with other chronic diseases who could tell similar stories - those who have suffered from mental disorders learning creative skills. I don’t think for one minute that anyone, including me who has written on this thread feels that being ill is a good thing, but being ill is part of life. We have to accept that we get ill, some worse than others and how we cope with that illness is our choice, we can either sink into despair and feel wronged or we can pick ourselves up and say what the hell.
babycham… def np this end…
i don’t think this thread meant to be pros and cons as such… tho that is up to dynamite to say.
i took it that there was still good to be had in life - Jane and Anwen have put 2 thoughtful posts up above as have others.
Wow what a thread this is
I have to agree with Jane about BC becoming a designer disease. By the end of October [Breast Cancer Awareness Month] I felt like some kind of mini celebrity, this seasons must have accessory is Breast Cancer. Its great for the awareness side of things obviously but when your in the middle of treatment that has to be experienced to be believed, whatever your prognosis is to have it in your face, on every girlie mag, on every chat show etc all the attention during a very difficult time is very tiring. I went into a shopping mall in my home town and felt like I’d walked into a surprise party with flags and balloons everywhere. I know no-one would know but you feel like they do and any minute a camp game show host is going to jump out and shout AJ COME ON DOWN!!!
As far as “pros” go, my prognosis is good and I am proud of myself for getting through this in one piece but I don’t know that that means I’m glad it happened cos I’m not.
Love to all
AJxxx
Ok, maybe i was a bit hasty with the cross comment, im not very clever with words in post and find it
hard to explain how i feel (thats why i dont post often)!
I wasnt saying i was cross because everyone should feel as i do, and yes everyone is entitled to their
opinion…it was my reaction i suppose, when i saw a dear friend of mine reply to this thread who is going
through absolute hell with this disease…
sorry if i offended anyone, ill shut up…for me its a definate no though…
Julie
xxx
I don’t see any pros to this disease and neither does my partner; his first wife died of it a few years ago and then I was diagnosed a year ago.
Sally
Julie, I was about to post, and I suspect what I was going to say would have been ‘offensive’ too. But like you I wanted to respond because like Janera says “Young women are dying before their adult lives have hardly begun, countless young children will lose their mothers, young women who longed for children are infertile.” who are posting in this thread. Although most are expressing their take on ‘pros and cons’ - I just felt some were quite insensitive towards those with a much poorer outcome and it made me feel quite angry too.
Dawn
No pros for me either.
All I can say is that some people must lead pretty awful lives if they think getting cancer is a bonus.
I lost my mother to breast cancer. My sons, the youngest was 6 when I was diagnosed, feared they would lose me too.